


Stay With Me

by glorious_spoon



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Episode: s03e18 The Beast Within, M/M, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 12:18:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18498835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Five perspectives on a single heartbreak.





	Stay With Me

I.

_Hawaii, Jamaica_ , Magnus says, and for the span of a single breath, Alec lets himself imagine it. It’s easy right now, with Magnus sober and smiling; he looks ragged around the edges like he always does these days, but that’s easy to ignore that if you’re not looking for it, as Alec knows entirely too well by now. It’s easy to imagine Magnus on a plane, complaining about the cramped quarters and the appalling beverage selection and peering out at the clouds from up above. Magnus walking in the surf and taking pictures of seagulls and pulling Alec into a smiling kiss while their bare feet squish in the wet sand and the salt spray stings their cheeks. It’s so real that he can almost taste it.

It would be so _easy_ to say yes.

 _Please don’t make me pretend that this is just a phase, because it’s not,_ Magnus said last night, and he was bitter and drunk but the words had the ring of truth all the same. More than all the brittle, frantic cheer he’s been projecting continually since he first lost his magic. _What I’m feeling now, it may never pass for as long as I live._

That’s the truth. That warm beach, the sun and salt air, the idea that anything Alec has left to offer could be enough--that’s a selfish fantasy, and he can’t keep pretending otherwise. He can’t keep forcing _Magnus_ to pretend otherwise. He can fix this, and it doesn’t matter if he has to break both their hearts to do it. Magnus will heal. It’ll hurt, but he’ll heal.

Alec won’t, but that’s irrelevant.

He lets out his breath and steps away from the warmth of Magnus’s hands, turning, making his face cold, his voice steady. He knows how to do this. He knows what to say. He might be a total fucking failure at loving Magnus the way he deserves, but Alec Lightwood has always been good at breaking things.

All told, it takes him less than a minute to reduce everything between them to smoking ruins. It’s easy, in the end, and that might just be what hurts most of all.

* * *

II.

In the aftermath he stands still and stunned, listening to Alec’s footsteps echo away into silence, the touch of Alec’s skin still burning on his palms and his lips. Every other part of him feels cold. Not just frozen but immobile and heavy, as if he’s been turned to stone.

Four hundred years old and he still somehow manages to be taken off-guard. Every single time.

It’s Camille he’s thinking of. Beautiful Camille, who saved him only so she could dismantle him with her own pretty hands. Even Camille never wanted him _gone_ , though. She wanted him unsteady and desperate, grasping at her like a drowning man. The pursuit was a drug to her. The begging.

His Alexander—

Not his. Not anymore. Alec doesn’t want that. Alec isn’t cruel like that. Alec didn’t want his desperation when he offered it; Alec doesn’t want anything from him, not anymore.

God. He’s tried so hard. It’s never been enough. Magnus, all his loud dysfunction, all the _too-much_ of him, and now there’s not even magic to curb it into something useful. Why on earth is he even surprised that this is what it’s come to? What was he expecting?

(He knows what he was expecting--hoping for, at least--but it hurts too much right now to put it into words)

The bookstore is warm, cozy, elegantly decorated with that silly box of things he brought from his old loft. The smell of the tea Maryse fixed on her little hot plate before she headed home still sweet and pungent in the air. He spins in place, hands in his hair, trying to capture some shred of that feeling, of love and family, of _belonging—_

There’s nothing. He passes a trembling hand over his face, then shoves open the doors and slips out into the empty night.

* * *

III.

It’s past three in the morning when she passes by Alec’s office and pauses at the line of light coming under the door. It’s not unheard of for Alec to pull a 24-hour shift, burning up his stamina rune and three pots of strong-brewed coffee, but there’s no need for it now. Clary and Jonathan are long gone, but there’s no immediate threat. Nothing that requires the Head of the Institute wearing himself down to the bone like they’re in the middle of a pitched battle. It would be better, really, if they could all get some rest and come at this with fresh eyes; she was expecting Jace to balk and has only just talked him into bed, but Alec—

Something leaden settles in her gut as she pushes the door open.

He’s sitting at his desk, the silhouette of the Angel Raziel dark behind him. Stacks of paperwork piled up in front of him, a half-full cup of coffee at his elbow and his stamina rune burning on his skin.

His eyes are red, like he’s been rubbing at them. Or like he’s been crying.

“Oh, Alec,” she sighs, slipping inside and letting the door fall shut behind her.

“Izzy,” he mutters without looking up. “You should be sleeping.”

“So should you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Alec,” she says softly, and she looks at his face and his trembling hands, and settles herself back against the solid oak of the door. “Tell me you didn’t do it. Please tell me you didn’t.”

He breathes in, a slow shudder across this teeth, and doesn’t look at her. “I had to.”

“You didn’t,” she says. He flinches a little, a short, abortive shift of his shoulders, and she suddenly wants to slap him. It’s a cold, brutal thing, shaped by exhaustion and frustration and these edges of her that no one can see. Not Alec or Jace, especially. She’s always had to be strong for them, especially now that they’re both breaking. She can’t even imagine what Magnus must feel right now. “How could you?”

“He’ll get his magic back. His immortality. Everything.”

“He’ll lose you.”

“He doesn’t need me,” Alec says, and closes his eyes tightly like a child in the depths of a nightmare.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Izzy tells him flatly. He flinches again, and she forces herself to soften. Crosses the room and takes his hand in both of hers. “It’s not too late. You could find him, you could tell him—”

“No,” Alec says shortly. She wishes she could be surprised at that, but she isn’t. When Alec commits to something, he really commits, even when that something is taking a sledgehammer to the best thing in his life. It would be admirable if it wasn’t currently so awful.

“Okay,” Izzy sighs, finally, and tugs on his hand. He resists for a moment before standing, swaying on his feet from grief or exhaustion or both. “Then at least go to bed. Get some sleep.”

It’s all the care right now that she can offer.

* * *

IV.

He feels it like a stone settling into the pit of his stomach, an echoing grief in the part of his soul that lives in another body. It’s a visceral thing; most of Alec’s feelings are. It makes it hard sometimes to distinguish them from his own, especially now.

It’ll be days before he manages to untwine the threads of _loss_ and _why_ and _god i miss you so much_ and realize that not all of it is coming from him. Days before he confronts Alec about it and watches him break in the quiet, controlled way that Alec always breaks.

For now, Jace twists restlessly in his sleep, his hand reaching blindly for-- _someone—_ who isn’t there.

* * *

V.

He feels the shift, the sudden baffled heartbreak. A death would have been too clean, although he considered it. Certainly the Lightwood boy would have agreed to any terms he offered. Nephilim never barter when true love is on the line, and the death of this lover in particular would have wounded Magnus in a way that few things in the past four centuries have.

But no. This is better. This is messy and tearing and deep. A death can be mourned and contextualized, but this… this just hurts. There’s a desperate, childish kind of disbelief beneath it all: Magnus at nine years old, standing in a burning building full of corpses, stunned at his first taste of a loss that would eventually consume him.

Perfect.

He raises the medium’s borrowed hand to the mirror, and a moment later he’s slipping through into the light and stink of the mortal world, drawn by the tether of his son's grief.

 


End file.
